Flip-Teaching Survey Results

It's been a few weeks, so I have decided to call time on the flip-teaching survey that I asked my students to complete. In all, 12 students completed the form on my website. That is about half of the students in the class. For the most part, the student's responses were positive about the flip-teaching format. However, as I stated in a previous post, this may be because these students were more predisposed to complete the survey.

I am not going to go through all of the data in detail in this post, but I would like to comment on some general trends that I saw. First, the students liked the videos and found them helpful. There were a few comments about the length of the videos and the number of the videos. Up until the last few videos, I was recording the videos using Jing. This meant that I had a 5 minute limit for each video. Each lesson took 2 or 3 videos. The last few videos were recorded using Camtasia Studios. These videos were usually about 10 - 12 minutes long with an occasional video being longer or shorter. I think that 10 minutes is a reasonable time with 15 minutes being the absolute max. I would like to find out what other teachers think about this and look at some research on this as well.

While the students found the videos helpful, most of the students did not use the videos to review concepts or to prepare for the test. In future surveys, I will make sure to add a "why or why not" follow-up to this question. I did provide study guides that we went over together in class, but I had hoped that students who were struggling with a certain concept would use the videos to help them on the study guide. I suggested this in class, but it seems only a few students did.

Finally, the students had mixed feelings about working with other students in class. Their responses indicate that like to do the bulk of the practice in class. However, the responses to the question "I found working with other students in class helped me understand the concepts better" were decidedly mixed. Again, I would like to add follow-up questions to find out why. Is it that the students did not like working in groups or that they found the multiple explanations more confusing than helpful? Or did some students feel intimidated by working with other students who were stronger in math? These are questions for future surveys.

So here is what I am taking away from this first attempt at implementing flip-teaching in my classroom:
1. Make the videos short and to the point.
2. Make the videos a part of the review process.
3. Be more in tune with how the students are performing in class.
4. Do a better mix of group work and individual work. This year I tended to emphasize group work in class.

I have added links to the original form and the data summary generated from the form if you would like to have a look at them:

Form that I asked them to complete: https://sites.google.com/a/juliancharterschool.org/ms-mathews-classroom/pre-algebra/flip-teaching-survey.

Summary of the results of the Flip Teaching survey completed by my students: http://tinyurl.com/flip-teaching-survey.